What's New: Summer 2026

Summer is here and already winding down, so let me catch you up on what landed in The Korean Vocabulary App over the last few months. Most of it comes back to one idea: Korean words are built out of parts, and they get a lot easier to learn once you can see the parts.

Ingredients

There's a new ingredients menu in the navigation now (with a cooking pot icon) with three pages inside: Affixes, Hanja, and Grammar. It's the biggest thing on this list, which is why it isn't on this list: it got a whole post of its own. Go read Introducing Ingredients and then come back for the smaller stuff.

About Two Thousand New Words

The word list itself grew — a lot. Roughly 2,000 words were added over the summer, bringing the app to 8,575 in total. The new entries push well past where the old list stopped, into the lower-frequency territory you need for reading news and books: the vocabulary that separates "I can order food" from "I can argue about politics."

The hanja reference grew right alongside — it now covers 1,978 characters, wired into the words that use them through more than 10,000 character-to-word links. That's what powers the hanja you see above quiz words and the Hanja page.

Hanja Right Above the Word

About 5,000 of the words in the app are hanja-based, and now it's easier to associate the sound with the character. In the quiz, the hanja characters are now printed directly above the syllables they belong to.

Skipping a Word You Just Don't Know

Sometimes the prompt comes up and there is simply nothing in the tank. You used to have to type some sacrificial wrong answer just to move on. Now press Enter on an empty answer and the Enter key turns into Skip — press it again to confirm. On the on-screen keyboard it's a proper "Don't know" key. A skipped word still counts as a miss, so it comes back around sooner, which is exactly what you want for a word you couldn't summon.

Teaching the Quiz It Was Wrong

Every so often you type an answer that's perfectly correct and the quiz marks it wrong, because that particular translation isn't in the accepted answer list. That used to be quietly infuriating. Now the word card offers a button: My answer was correct. Press it and the miss is erased — the penalty is discarded, the review is recorded as correct, and your answer joins your custom accepted answers list so it's accepted from then on. Couldn't I just mark everything correct? You could! You'd also be lying to a scheduler whose entire job is to help you remember things, so I'll leave that between you and your conscience.

Per-language Hardcore Mode

The quiz normally forgives a one-letter slip. Hardcore mode requires exact spelling and turns that forgiveness off. Now you can separate Korean and English toggles under the main switch. Being strict about Korean spelling while staying relaxed about whether you typed "happiness" or "happines" is a perfectly sensible place to land.

And if spelling is where you wobble, the Show word card on misspelling toggle pairs nicely with all of this — a near-miss brings up the full word card so the correct spelling gets a proper look before you move on.

Typing Hangul Like a Real Keyboard

Typing Korean answers while your keyboard is in English now composes the way a real Korean IME does: jamo assemble into syllables as you go, with the in-progress syllable highlighted. Backspace got smarter too — it peels off one jamo at a time instead of vaporizing the whole syllable. If you've ever been three letters into 꿰뚫다 and had to start the syllable over, you know exactly why this matters.

Causative and Passive

Verb cards now have a new Causative & Passive (사동/피동) section. It's a grid: active and passive down the side, transitive and intransitive across the top.

Reviews

If you have opted in or recently created an account, your reviews are being scheduled by FSRS instead of the fixed SRS ladder, and new accounts get it by default now. I wrote about that one on its own: Your Reviews Are About to Get Smarter.

Smaller Things

• Word audio moved to proper storage and got a quality pass, and playback no longer lags or fetches files it doesn't need.
• The on-screen keyboard can now type every answer the quiz will accept, which was not previously true and was as annoying as it sounds.
• Profile settings stage behind a Save changes button now, instead of committing the moment you touch a toggle.
• Your dashboard Lessons card shows which learning track you're on.
• The offline banner is a theme-matched bar at the bottom of the screen rather than an intrusion at the top.
• Handwriting mode now renders hanja in a handwriting font too, not just the hangul.
• You can manage your subscription from inside the app now, including upgrading to lifetime with credit for what you've already paid.
• Example sentences respect the nsfw content filter now.
• Study-reminder emails match dark mode instead of searing your retinas at 1 am.

Go Poke At It

The Ingredients pages are the ones I'd start with, especially if you've been learning words as flat little units — seeing that 始 (시) shows up in dozens of words you already know is a genuinely nice feeling.

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